Student Information:
Michael Mori (MALD 2015)
Michael Mori (MALD 2015)
I will be joining Trevor and Gustavo for the project “Connections
amongst current Fletcher cohort,” and so am posting this proposal as an
up-for-grabs SNA project for other students joining the second module of the course.
Research Question
Do major media organizations that have the same political biases also similarly cover breaking news events? (Sub-question: do political biases in media
organizations affect their breaking news coverage, and if so to what degree?
Hypothesis
Media bias is reflected in breaking news coverage, but the
bias is not as pronounced as it is in conventional coverage because of the need
to cover relevant national attention grabbing stories; therefore, while we will
see a correlation between media bias and breaking news coverage, it will not be
a strong correlation and it will vary from outlet to outlet, despite evidence of shared bias.
Background
Anyone who regularly gets their news from a wide variety of
online sources will have noticed biases in news coverage. These biases commonly
take the form of political angles on particular stories and are reflected in
the prioritization of coverage on the front page of the outlet’s app or website.
Other times media organizations simply do not cover stories at all. However,
when news is “breaking,” meaning that it is a big story takes precedent over
all other stories under coverage at the given moment, most will give some
coverage to it. Here’s where it gets interesting.
Many media organizations issue breaking news through alerts
on mobile applications, via emails to subscribers and of course on their
websites. Each of these organizations keeps a close eye on the coverage of
their competitors and is responsive to their coverage, especially breaking news
stories. I have access to a dataset of all the breaking news email alerts sent
out by 15 major media outlets over the past 14 months.
This dataset includes a timestamp for each breaking news
email, a start and end time for each breaking news event, subject tags for each email, top tags over various periods of time, number of alerts per week per
outlet, number of breaking news events per week, and number of emails sent by
each outlet on the each story as it evolved over time.
This data can be used along with information from numerous studies
that have already been done on media bias to get a better idea of whether media
organizations with similar biases have similar coverage of breaking news
through email alerts.
Methodology
This project has four major steps of analysis. The first is
to identify and select the best most recent study on the bias of each of the
major media organizations for which I have data, and then to add this attribute
to the data mix.
Once this has been accomplished, you should look through the
breaking news events for the 14 months and categorize them in terms of bias; either
as pro-liberal, pro-conservative or neutral (neither helpful nor harmful to
either political group). Next, individually look at each media outlet and
analyze whether its coverage of breaking news events reflects its alleged bias,
and if so to what degree.
The fourth and most interesting step is to look at the
organizations and see how they are connected to one another by media bias -- meaning
whether or not they share the same bias -- and then look to see if and how their
breaking news coverage overlaps. To do this, you will analyze the data to
examine if media organizations with shared bias covered (or did not cover) the same
breaking news events. Be sure to look into the extent of their coverage as the
story progressed over time. Another point of inquiry would be into the use of
tags. News sources that have a lot of tags in common and have a high overlap in
coverage may be similar. The question is whether or not that similarity is
reflected there alleged bias.
Potential Limitations
Social network analysis alone cannot fully explain why a media outlet chooses to issue (or omit) a breaking news alert via email. Indeed
one major news outlet, Yahoo, issues on average less than one breaking news
email per week. This research will be able to shed light on whether or not media
organizations with the same alleged bias cover breaking news in a similar way
that reflects that bias.
1 comment:
There's a lot of potential here, and I hope someone takes you up on your offer to share the data. You are also right that whoever undertakes this should consult previous work on media bias, as what you recommend, seeing if bias affects breaking news, sounds like it might yield a too-predictable answer, and it's not obvious what SNA can bring to the mix. In fact, the more nuanced answer might not come from SNA, but from questions like how long into a breaking news story does it take (on average) for bias to appear, and does it vary by where on the spectrum the network is.
Post a Comment